Not too long ago I reviewed Beastly, the anemic retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story starring Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Hudgens. I guess it’s only fitting that this review’s on 2011’s Red Riding Hood which, like Beastly, took a classic fairy tale and strangled the life out of it. To be fair, I liked Red Riding Hood more than Beastly as it at least made some valiant efforts to mix up a story which according to Wikipedia has had over twenty incarnations on film since the mid-1960s. If you’re doing a quick computation in your head, that’s one new Red Riding Hood adaptation every other year. In this version, Amanda Seyfriend plays Valerie, the beautiful and somewhat rebellious younger daughter of Cesaire (Billy Burke) and Suzette (Virginia Madsen). Her village of Daggerhorn is bucolic and tranquil, but it wasn’t always so. Two decades earlier, the countryside was terrorized by a werewolf but an uneasy peace was enacted through the annual sacrifice of livestock. I’m not really sure how ritualistically slaughtering cattle appeases a werewolf, but hey, it’s the Middle Ages and we have to assume the people of Daggerhorn are dimwitted peasants. When Valerie’s older sister is killed by the wolf however, it’s clear that the truce has been broken and the men of Daggerhorn wield their pitchforks and torches and set off in pursuit of the monster. This fails of course, again because of that “dimwitted peasants” thing and the defense of the village falls to a renowned werewolf killer / witch hunter / unrepentant sadist named Father Solomon (Gary Oldman). But taking down the beast proves complicated when it’s revealed that the wolf can communicate telepathically with Valerie and has some nefarious plan for her. Worse yet, Valerie discovers that the monster has been living in the village as a human being all along. But who is it?

It’s this “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing” angle which gives Red Riding Hood its only real moments of tension. If Red Riding Hood had stuck to emulating such masterpieces of paranoia as The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it might’ve been a better film. But sadly, the red herrings tossed to the audience become insulting after a while – such as Valerie noting that the werewolf’s eyes are dark brown, which is hardly a helpful clue in a world where 90% of humanity has brown eyes. When the identity of the wolf is finally revealed, it’s done so like a third-rate Agatha Christie mystery with flashbacks providing information the audience was never privy to the first time ‘round. Lame.But even worse is that much of the film is crafted like an installment of Twilight with heavy pandering to the perceived sensibilities of young adults. Like a vampire-smitten lass of our acquaintance, poor Valerie’s stuck in the middle of a romantic triangle between two uber-hot guys, a woodcutter named Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and blacksmith called Henry (Max Irons). Even the action in this self-described horror-thriller never rises above the Twilight level. Most of the violence occurs out of sight and there’s very little blood at all. And the CGI werewolf, well, looks pretty darn similar to that over-grown puppy Jacob kept transforming into. In the end, I don’t know if I can say Red Riding Hood's a disappointment because it did fulfill my expectations. They were just really low expectations.

Here be spoilers.

Not too long ago I reviewed Beastly, the anemic retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story starring Alex Pettyfer and Vanessa Hudgens. I guess it’s only fitting that this review’s on 2011’s Red Riding Hood which, like Beastly, took a classic fairy tale and strangled the life out of it. To be fair, I liked Red Riding Hood more than Beastly as it at least made some valiant efforts to mix up a story which according to Wikipedia has had over twenty incarnations on film since the mid-1960s. If you’re doing a quick computation in your head, that’s one new Red Riding Hood adaptation every other year. In this version, Amanda Seyfriend plays Valerie, the beautiful and somewhat rebellious younger daughter of Cesaire (Billy Burke) and Suzette (Virginia Madsen). Her village of Daggerhorn is bucolic and tranquil, but it wasn’t always so. Two decades earlier, the countryside was terrorized by a werewolf but an uneasy peace was enacted through the annual sacrifice of livestock. I’m not really sure how ritualistically slaughtering cattle appeases a werewolf, but hey, it’s the Middle Ages and we have to assume the people of Daggerhorn are dimwitted peasants. When Valerie’s older sister is killed by the wolf however, it’s clear that the truce has been broken and the men of Daggerhorn wield their pitchforks and torches and set off in pursuit of the monster. This fails of course, again because of that “dimwitted peasants” thing and the defense of the village falls to a renowned werewolf killer / witch hunter / unrepentant sadist named Father Solomon (Gary Oldman). But taking down the beast proves complicated when it’s revealed that the wolf can communicate telepathically with Valerie and has some nefarious plan for her. Worse yet, Valerie discovers that the monster has been living in the village as a human being all along. But who is it?

It’s this “wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing” angle which gives Red Riding Hood its only real moments of tension. If Red Riding Hood had stuck to emulating such masterpieces of paranoia as The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it might’ve been a better film. But sadly, the red herrings tossed to the audience become insulting after a while – such as Valerie noting that the werewolf’s eyes are dark brown, which is hardly a helpful clue in a world where 90% of humanity has brown eyes. When the identity of the wolf is finally revealed, it’s done so like a third-rate Agatha Christie mystery with flashbacks providing information the audience was never privy to the first time ‘round. Lame.But even worse is that much of the film is crafted like an installment of Twilight with heavy pandering to the perceived sensibilities of young adults. Like a vampire-smitten lass of our acquaintance, poor Valerie’s stuck in the middle of a romantic triangle between two uber-hot guys, a woodcutter named Peter (Shiloh Fernandez) and blacksmith called Henry (Max Irons). Even the action in this self-described horror-thriller never rises above the Twilight level. Most of the violence occurs out of sight and there’s very little blood at all. And the CGI werewolf, well, looks pretty darn similar to that over-grown puppy Jacob kept transforming into. In the end, I don’t know if I can say Red Riding Hood's a disappointment because it did fulfill my expectations. They were just really low expectations.